Trust.
Big topic. Everybody wants services and goods around them to be trustworthy. To not have to look at the invoice, because you've trusted somebody or somebodies that they have done right by you.
I NEED people around me to be trustworthy. I'm house-bound, leaving every couple of months to see doctors or a series of doctors. So, I have my prescriptions delivered (shoutout to the BramQueen PharmaSave and their phenomenal staff who I discovered after 50 years of trusting Shopper's DrugMart ... which was maybe 10 years too long). I have my friend Marilyn, with help from my friends James and Mark, help out with food and transportation. When there's a blank spot in their calendars, I've been able to mostly trust GroceryGateway for, well, groceries.
But not all groceries. There were some products Marilyn found hard to find and that GG just didn't have. Marilyn reported that Metro.ca was now competing with GG. And there was a deal that meant free delivery for three orders over a three-week span AND a bag of random goodies on the first order. So, I gleefully filled my Metro.ca shopping cart with all the items I had had problems getting (Cavendish played a big part here, with their Onion Rings and Restaurant-Style French Fries, and Metro.ca also carried the Selection brand of products, including the nectar of the gods, the indispensable Mandarin Orange soda). So, I ordered the goods to be delivered the following afternoon.
I was downstairs waiting for delivery when the delivery person called to inform me that they were outside my front door. I plodded my way over to the door, opened it, and peered out at an empty drive way. I called back, using the call return feature of my phone, and informed the driver that he was at the wrong address. I gave him my address. At the time, I didn't know who's driveway he was parked in.
Leaning out the door, I peered up and down my road, waiting to see the truck as it came into view. I watched as the driver (who I now knew to be ... as directionally-impaired as I was, and I get lost as soon as I get outside my front door. I'm LEGENDARILY bad with directions), as he pulled his truck into the driveway ... of my next door neighbour. Sigh. God save us from ... directionally-impaired people. I am SO proud of my calm and patience writing this. It'll end soon. But I've got this far without any nasty jibes. Stay tuned.
I yelled out the door at the cretin (see, my limit for not going ballistic lasted six paragraphs), "NO, over here!" shouting at him my address. Again. So, once again, said idiot, pulled out of the wrong address and finally got it right on the third try. I'd refrained from any name-calling, but I was thinking them, and adding adjectives to more accurately describe the level of stupidity I was witnessing. (As Mom will say, "beware name-calling, you might deserve some yelling at too." Too true).
The driver said a quick, "Sorry, sorry," and then went about the business of delivering the goods. I proffered the required identification the website had warned me of, but he just waived me off and started hauling the groceries into the house. No good sturdy boxes like GG (who, admittedly, had started using lots of green plastic bags and only a few boxes, of late). No, the whole delivery was in bright red bags, a contrast that I'm sure is nowhere close to coincidence. Some of the bags were dropped at the front closet (where do YOU store your soda??) and the rest in the kitchen. I signed the electronic device he thrust at me and they departed. Without much furtherance of the apologies, other than saying it was HQ's fault. I was okay with that. Recently, I've gotten into an apology war, fit for Alphonse and Gaston. It's awfully tiring. I think both sides of a discussion should be allowed a maximum of one sorry per week.
The food ran the gamut from good to great for the items I ordered. Except the small case of Coca-Cola with orange. This was a mistake on my part and I vow NEVER EVER to order flavoured Coca-Cola ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again. May Marilyn hit me about the head. The freebies almost completely ended up with Marilyn, who seemed to derive some enjoyment from them. I split the very, very green bananas with here and kept a wonderful loaf of artisanal bread. I burbled with happiness when Marilyn came over to get her share of the haul.
I wasn't forgetting the delivery snafu. I did the on-line survey as requested by email and let them know the delivery to the wrong house was a mistake that needed correcting. I also had a LOT of issues with the shopping interface on the web-site. 'Course, I have major grievances against GG's site too. And given I write POS (Point of Sale) software, my opinion is not exactly uninformed.
I had three orders with free delivery coming up. On Thursday night, I decided to take advantage of the first of them. I put in an order that would have been bigger, but a limit on ordering the Mandarin soda showed up without warning. The interface didn't allow me to merely type in 36 and be done. No, I had to hit the Plus button and wait for the interface to update with each click. Horrible, time-consuming and unlike better shopper carts, no expectation of a limit until I tried to add a 13th bottle. Arrrrggghhh!!!!! I don't drink alcohol. Don't (mostly) do sugared soda either. This is sugar-free, calory-free stuff that doesn't taste like Engine Cleaner (not that I know what that actually tastes like). When trying to self-motivate, I hold a bottle of the stuff in the fridge out as a reward. And here, they were limiting me without warning. Fill in your guess at what string of epithets I used. You're short a word or three.
Okay, let's get this delivered between six and eight tomorrow, which by this time, was actually today, I think.
Come the supper hour, I hauled butt downstairs and sat in my TV chair waiting. I watched an hour of CNN and the ever-present Friday Foul-up of the Week (Trademark pending). The Obstructionist Orange Oleaginous Oaf of the Oval Office doing his best to create a new lower limit for rating humanity. Not a good mood inducer. Then an hour of the Toronto Blue Jay game. It made things worse. Five minutes past eight, I went to my tablet to get the phone number for Metro.ca customer support.
And there it was, an email, asking me to fill out a new survey. The groceries had been delivered a half-hour ago. Immediately, I assumed the village idiot had done a Comrade Donald-like quadrupling down of something stupid and failed to ring the VERY LOUD doorbell and had merely piled the groceries on my front step and did a runner. I stumbled my way to the front door, opened it, expecting a sea of red, and found ... nothing. Nada. Zilch. President Small Hand's most recent score for mental acuity.
Back to the chair to call Metro.ca. After a moderately long wait, I got somebody named Donna. At least I think it was Donna. Obviously, future events were to question my hearing. Donna, regrettably, was soon to be subjected to my wrath. I think I apologized three times in all for yelling at her. Still feel bad about doing that to a lady. I know it's sexist, but I would have rather been yelling at Brad. Or Raj. Or Juan. Or Orlando. Or Herschel (my Aunt Dorothy's life-long nickname for me). Or Ian. But it was Donna. I think.
I explained the situation and heard her furiously typing in notes. Her silence after the first apology when I was being polite spoke loudly. Even she was shocked by what had went on. She asked for time to talk to a superior over remedies. I graciously, truly, I was gracious, thanked her for looking into this. She put me on hold and I examined the emails I hadn't bothered reading (indeed, commercial stuff that's 95 percent sales come-ons, gets automatically shunted to my "Ignore unless needed" folder). There, right on the two emails announcing my order and then the warning it was coming, was the wrong address. Yep. The wrong address.
This could have been a major oopsie on my part and a tail-between-the-legs moment on the phone. But no, I was still on morally upper ground. The driver obviously knew of the address mistake. One would have assumed he would have complained to management. I'd told the survey LEAVING MY PHONE NUMBER. Which nobody called. But I had made a second order with the auto wrong-address being used without looking at it. And truth be told, the differences between the two numbers was maybe two small pixels. And I'm at an age where it might be good to get my eyesight checked. I've been ducking the Drs. Thompson because I don't want new glasses. I'd prefer a new computer.
So, when Donna returned, I copped to being complicit in this idiocy. But, as I informed her again, I had told the driver, who I would have assumed told his management, and the survey. Further, the thieves at the other address had signed as GARY MUGFORD (I assumed) for the delivery of groceries they'd never ordered. That's fraud from where I stand and I hope a detective from the local constabulary visits. I want a pound of flesh from those thieving souls. A broken kneecap might suffice. I wish a plague of horrors upon all the inhabitants of the house.
Now, at some point SOMEBODY had to have said to the driver, "I/We didn't order anything." Said driver had to have asked himself, let me verify this. And whatever happened next, the driver and the thieves conspired to take the groceries I HAD PAID FOR! All of this was shouted into the phone.
I apologized for the second time to Donna. Not to Metro.ca. But to Donna. Then she informed me NOTHING could be done tonight to fix things. Tomorrow morning. Which was going to be better than replacing the order with an order with GroceryGateway. The soonest I could get stuff from them would be Sunday. I told Donna that morning would be fine, as long as it was 11 AM or later. Preferably 1 PM. Oh, and I wanted an apology from Metro.ca. I'd lost it again. So, a third apology was in the offing.
And that ended the phone call. Right now, as I write this, before the inevitable edits, it's closer to 3 PM. The deadline for resolution of this mess is daylight's end today. I don't want a delivery in the dark. Too easy for this merry band of fools to get it wrong. I am sanguine of getting the food (and soda, sadly for the last time). The apology?? Of that, I figure my odds are roughly equivalent with winning the lottery. These clowns are going to replace my food, knowing my cancellation of our association is almost automatic.
And the story continues...
Not long after writing the first three-quarters of this long-winded rant for this blog, I called the comically-misnamed Customer Support again. Patrick answered. In a half-hour of talking to him, nothing. Nothing was accomplished. I wasn't allowed to talk to a supervisor (His supervisor was new, having replaced PATRICK in the job a week ago ... yep, I was talking to The Demoted) and, miraculously, nobody 'there' had ever heard of Donna. Yet, just as miraculously, my address info had miraculously been corrected. But no magic, however powerful, could compel him to have my groceries delivered that day (or any day). A waste of time. I did apologize to him twice, once after SCREAMING into his ear after he told me to, in effect, hurry up and finish my story. I have that problem. I like all the details when I am faced with trying to resolve a problem. I foolishly think others, who work in the support sector, have the same detail-oriented approach. So, I treated Patrick the same as Donna. Somebody not deserving of being yelled at. I was wrong. Wrong as in, he deserved not to be yelled at.
Sunday? Shawn/Sean or something in-between. This lowest-level on the evolutionary support scale categorically refused to let me talk to a supervisor. He, like the other two, put me on hold to talk to somebody with higher authority than him ... I believe the word you're thinking is, Supervisor, then came back on the phone and told me, and this shocked me, "No, you can't talk to a supervisor. Somebody will call you in the next 24-48 hours." Head, palm, smack. Epithet. I'm proud I never let a curse pass through my lips in three separate half-hour phone calls. Didn't even engage in any name-calling. Which was INCREDIBLY stressful. Which my doctors REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate. This carbuncle on the back-side of customer support wouldn't last a day at any company I worked with. It'd be him or me and I write the systems software. Bye-bye. The company's better off without you. This blithering idiot said, seven times, cuz I counted, "I understand your frustration." No, he didn't. No, he didn't at all.
So, I called the cops. After talking to a retired detective friend who told me it was likely the case was a civil one. But a winning one. On the other hand, if the criminals at the other address had signed my name ...
The officers who came to talk to me were polite, empathetic and almost ready to get involved. But I was not the aggrieved party. The crooks five doors down had stolen from Metro.ca, not me. And with lawyer bills being what they are, the likelihood was that Metro.ca would not swear out a complaint, just absorb the cost of doing business. But if they did, the officers would be back to talk to me as a (WILLING) witness. I tried to get them to call Metro.ca, if only to say that. They smiled, an shook their head. I think they respected me for trying to get them to engage Metro.ca, but stuck to non-involvement in what to them was a civil matter. A nice interaction with the local constabulary. And despite not getting the wrath of the law on my side, I can't complain.
Hmmm, it's now Monday. Late afternoon. That idiot Shawn's prediction of a response coming on Tuesday seems pretty solid.
Then the phone rang. A gentlemen introduced himself as being from Metro. I didn't catch the name. Didn't want to. I knew where the conversation was going, so why add one more name to the list of people I hope to haunt from the dead as soon as I get interred or crisped up beyond all redemption. I'll still be busy with the Shawn's of the world.
The call came in about 5 PM. I asked him at one point in the conversation whether if I'd agreed to it, whether I would have had groceries Monday evening. "No." So, the supervisorly response from Metro.ca was not to deliver my paid-for groceries on the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday, the Monday but maybe by the Tuesday. Please pause for an epithet break. He started, I believe, to tell me the groceries would be delivered eventually and that any charges would be withdrawn. Maybe offer me some inducement. Free delivery on my next order? Ten free deliveries? A million deliveries. Free for life? Don't know. I cut him off. I despise people who complain in order to get something free in exchange for silencing their opinion. Too much of an ego. My honor is worth more than most companies would even dream of offering. I admit, there's been times where I've taken inducements. I then hate myself for a decade before my failing memory lets me do it again.
Marilyn and I had discussed it. She'd suggested I ask for two cases of my beloved Mandarin soda every month, delivered for free, for a year. Which would have been good. After all, I was dealing with Metro.ca in large part so that I wasn't asking her every week to break her back lugging soda from the store to my house. She's an angel. Time I repaid that kindness in small part when and where I can.
Nope. I went for the cut my nose off to spite my face response. "Gimme my money back and I never want to deal with Metro.ca or Metro ever again." And when he used the lawyerly, "Let me get this clear..." I cut him off again, "I know you are taping this phone call. For the lawyers who are listening, I want my money returned and then I never want to hear from Metro again." Which ended my fourth and final interaction with 'Customer Support' at Metro.ca. And I will never order from them, allow Marilyn to buy product there on my behalf or ever drink another bottle of Mandarin soda again. Well, after I empty the closet. I wasn't going to accept any freebies from this empathy-deprived organization that had caused me no end of stress for four days and thought bribery might appease me. They were wrong.
Because in the end, you can't trust Metro.ca.
NOTE: I have used the real names, albeit with guessed-at spelling here. To the best of my hearing. I will point out some ironies. My best friend's name is Patrick. His wife's name is Dawna. Shawn is my more-than-helpful neighbour from the other side from James. NONE of those three were the Donna, Patrick or Shawn I talked to.
